Thoughts on the teacher's body

...a good deal of what is fascinating about the “savage other” is its existence as our alter ego, as an idealized abstraction of what lurks beneath our veneer of civilization. It is crucial to remember this point, for it is the queer subject’s own “savageness” in the classroom that both licenses her to speak (by giving inside/emic knowledge) and makes her suspect. The automatic and presumptive sexualizing/fetishizing of the queer body constructs us as Other, destabilizes our Be-ing, forces an intimacy with anyone in our orbit. The body of the queer becomes the “public sphere” of the multicultural classroom, mediating private self and state authority (as expressed in the narratives of inclusion underlying multicultural classrooms).

It is alarming to realize that one’s body is not one’s own, particularly if one is in a context (the classroom) in which “bodies” and “passions” and “emotions” are not supposed to exist at all. To be “embodied” by others and then filled with meaning is disconcerting, and it is threatening. How are we to “compose ourselves” in such a system? Such composition comes at unacknowledged personal cost—moral, social, religious, sometimes legal cost. Sometimes it comes at great physical cost. Is it worth it? Maybe. There’s not a right answer to that question.